... aka: Captive Women II: Orgies of the Damned
... aka: Dachau no. 2
... aka: Horreurs nazies (Nazi Horrors)
... aka: Nazi Experiment Love Camp
... aka: S.S. Experiment
... aka: S.S. Experiment Camp
... aka: S.S. Experiment Love Camp
Directed by:
Sergio Garrone
With its gleefully nasty and over-the-top mixture of nudity, sex, torture, gore, sadism and camp sensibilities, plus its charismatic star, ILSA, SHE WOLF OF THE SS (1974) is clearly the standard by which to measure all of these other Nazisploitation films by. Hey, if you're going to be sick and tasteless, you might as well go all out, right? While S.S. Experiment Camp certainly tries its best to provide all the essentials, it lacks both the edge and the enthusiasm necessary to make it a memorable film in its subgenre. Things begins on a familiar note, with a nude woman strapped to an electric chair being forced to recite a pledge to Hitler. When she refuses to comply, she's shot up with a drug, tossed into an oven and is roasted alive. A truck load of specially-selected young women arrive at the medical / prison camp soon after and learn that things could be so much worse. After all, what they're about to be forced to do is a "great honor" and a "privilege." The name of the game here folks is sex experiments. And if you're willing to spread your legs for the Third Reich you gets lots of nifty little perks. Like marmalade.
Run by the blonde-haired, blue eyed, impotent (more on that later) Colonel von Kleiben (Giogio Cerioni), the camp employs two primary doctors; Dr. Renke (Patrizia Melega), a stern, stone-faced lesbian loyal to the cause, and Professor Abraham (Attilio Dottesio), a world-famous scientist and German traitor (i.e. Jew) who's hiding out there under the alias of "Dr. Steiner." The new arrivals are immediately stripped naked and given a physical. Some are sent off to Magda's (Paola Lelio) whorehouse, while the more fertile of the group are kept around and forced to have sex with "the fine physical specimens of German manhood" (aka young soldiers). One of the ladies, Mirelle (Paola Corazzi) ends up falling in love with handsome male subject, Sgt. Helmut Gruber (Mircha Carven), and vice versa. But Mirelle has some competition from the Colonel, who also has his eyes on the strapping young soldier's manhood prize. Confused? Well, we'll get to that here in a bit.
Some of the ladies do what they gotta do to stay alive, while others resist and end up in the ole oven. Dunya (Almina De Sanzio) starts having sex with the lez doctor in hopes it'll make her time there go more smoothly, while another of the ladies, Sonia (Matilde Dall'Aglio), puts in an energetic romp with a soldier in the camp's water tank Jacuzzi bath (!!) The bath has a switch where it can be turned icy cold as one woman deemed a "frigid Puritanical bitch" soon finds out. A blonde teenage virgin in the group loses her virtue to a brutish general (Serafino Profumo) and retaliates by stabbing him a bunch of times with a fork before trying to escape. She's shot, hung upside down and bleeds to death. Lots of other women also die on the operating table as the doctors attempt to perfect "ovary transplants" or shoot high-pressure air directly into their eardrums. The Colonel meanwhile decides to test claims that Helmut is "a verifiable stud; the best of the lot" by drugging his wine and bringing in two prostitutes. After finding out Dr. Steiner's secret identity, the Colonel blackmails him into performing a testicle transplant because a Jewish woman had bit his off awhile back when he raped her. This leads to a violent retaliation from our sensitive, love-struck hero, who finally proves to have balls during the finale. Figuratively speaking, of course.
This is nothing but straight-up trash, which is OK if
you're a fan of sleazy violence, technical ineptitude and almost non-stop full
frontal nudity from a bunch of (mostly) homely-looking women. The acting is so
terrible, the dialogue so awful ("What have you been doing with my balllllssssss!?!"),
the sets so pathetic and the direction so nonexistent there's not a single
moment that's the least bit believable, let alone disturbing or even offensive.
In fact, although this was on the original video nasty banned list in the UK,
upon reevaluation in 2005 they allowed it to pass completely uncut because they
found the whole thing - in their own words - "very mild and poorly executed." This is indeed bad. Really bad. But... I gotta
admit I was pretty entertained throughout. I'll go hang my head in shame now.
The director also made a number of spaghetti westerns (including numerous
Django films), a couple of horror flicks filmed in Turkey featuring Klaus
Kinski and another Nazi exploitation flick called SS Camp 5: Women's Hell
(1977) featuring most of the actors seen in this one. Wizard and Video Gems
both issued this on VHS and there was a 2005 DVD from Exploitation Digital. The
"sequel," S.S. Experiment Camp 2, was actually a re-titling of La
bestia in calore ("The Beast in Heat").
SBIG
